When there is a natural concentration of interest, not mere control, you begin to discover that thought is in a process of constant imitation and that it is ever wandering through its many layers of memories, precepts, examples; or, having had a stimulating sensation or experience during moments of concentration, it recreates it and tries to vivify the past sensation, but thereby it only stultifies its own creative process; or, apart from daily life, thought tries to develop various qualities in order to control its daily actions, and living loses its inherent significance, and standard becomes most important.
All this then is merely a form of approximation and not creative meditation. If you are aware in your daily activities—when you are talking, when you are walking, when you are making money or seeking pleasure—in that awareness, depending on your earnestness, there begins an understanding, a love, which is not at the behest of intellect or of emotion. So, meditation is a process of awareness in action. From the reality of life must spring meditation, and then meditation is a process of self-liberation. Meditation is not the approximation of a pattern. The stilling of the mind through will, choice, may achieve certain calmness, but this calmness is of death, producing languor. This is not meditation. But the understanding of choice, which is a very delicate and strenuous process, is meditation in which there is calmness without a trace of languor or contentment. There must be alert and strenuous discernment in meditation. Meditation is a process of completeness, wholeness, not a series of achievements culminating in reality.
The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti – Volume III 1936-1944: The Mirror of Relationship
Jiddu Krishnamurti